New Orleans' post-Katrina gentrification is touchy

Shirley M. Moeeisa, left, and Chantel Young, look at a magazine on a balcony in the Iberville housing projects, which are slated to be torn down, in New Orleans, Thursday, Aug. 23, 2012. The face of New Orleans is changing: Seven years after Hurricane Katrina the city many said would not recover is racially more diverse, and whiter, younger and richer; indicators not of failure but its success at reinventing itself. In fact, the city is experiencing a boom, and even gentrifying.

Gerald Herbert, Associated Press

Summary

With Isaac bearing down on New Orleans, the city finds itself at a delicate moment in its rebuilding since Hurricane Katrina struck seven years ago.

NEW ORLEANS — With Isaac bearing down on New Orleans, the city finds itself at a delicate moment in its rebuilding since Hurricane Katrina struck seven years ago.

Private and government investment is fueling the push to overhaul some of the city's troubled but culturally rich neighborhoods near the French Quarter, where poor families are being replaced as wealthier ones move in. While the city's in a boom and even gentrifying, some question whether it will wither the roots that grew the city's distinctive identity.

"New Orleans is becoming a boutique city like San Francisco," said Gary Clark, a politics professor at Dillard University. "You may see black middle class moving in, but with gentrification there's overwhelmingly white individuals of means who become the new urban pioneers."

The number of whites, although smaller than before Katrina, has grown as an overall percentage from 28 percent to 33 percent of the city's population. The city has its first white mayor since the 1970s, while the City Council now has a majority of white members.

On the flip side, blacks say there's danger that their community will be diminished in a city that owes deep cultural and economic debts to its Afro-Caribbean roots. Since the storm the African-American community has shrunk by about 118,500 people, dropping from about 68 percent of the population to about 60 percent.

"(Blacks) don't see themselves as being a part of the recovery economy and getting real opportunity," said Nolan V. Rollins, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans president.

It's not clear what effect Isaac could have on the city. On Tuesday afternoon, the storm had become a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 75 mph.

Isaac was expected to come ashore near New Orleans by early Wednesday, the seventh anniversary of Katrina's devastating strike on the city.

This winter the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to demolish the last of the New Deal-era public housing still standing in New Orleans — the 850-unit Iberville complex. It was erected over the slums of what was for a time the nation's only legal red-light district, Storyville.

The demolition is part of a $31 million HUD "choice neighborhoods" project, a concept pushed by the Obama administration across the nation. HUD hopes that by starting the process of gentrification, private investment will follow and the communities will become desirable places for all races and classes to live in.

Linda Couch, a public housing expert at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, said the new approach "has the elements of success."

Meanwhile, another $4 billion in private and government investment has been pouring into the historic neighborhoods of Iberville and Treme, the hearth of the city's African-American culture.

The 1.4 square miles where much of the redevelopment is occurring has long been known for gumbo, jazz, voodoo and civil rights pioneers. Immigrants from around the world lived side by side with blacks in Treme and Iberville, where Louis Armstrong once walked the streets and delivered coal as a boy.

But the entire area fell on hard times after the 1960s, as whites moved to the suburbs and bad urban planning took its toll. By the time Katrina hit, it was struggling and looked like an urban desert of blight, drugs and abandonment in many areas.

The plan for redeveloping the area could include the removal of a noisy concrete interstate expressway that runs through Treme with the hope of restoring what was one of the city's main streets for black commerce. Work is already underway to turn an unused rail corridor into a miles-long walking and bike path called the Lafitte Greenway, turning old schools into new charters and opening "fresh-food" supermarkets.

Taking down the Iberville housing complex is crucial, planners say, to connect Treme with the downtown's theater and business district on Canal Street.